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2001 F150 Supercab

imageHere’s the insurance settlement for the Mustang. I’m starting out with 34,545 miles on the ODO (I don’t buy new cars – I despise the immediate depreciation). I found this and several trucks on autotrader.com. Then I started calling around and emailing the dealers. I finally bought this one at University Ford in Durham. They were extremely easy to work with. From the time I got to the dealership until the time I left with the truck was less than 2 hours.

imageI’m pretty happy with the deal I got including an extended 3 year 36K mile warrenty and gap insurance for an extra $495.00. I never have to worry about the possibility of being upside down in an insurance settlement again. Only bad thing is that it already needs an oil change and I just drove it off the lot a week ago. Oh well, that’s nothing compared to how I’ve been screwed on ebay deals recently.

The Coolscan scanner is proving to be bear to install under XP because of the SCSI drivers. And I won a used Minolta X370 from some guy for $27.00 and he shipped me an old Maxxum 3000i with a broken lens instead. I’m trying to stay civil to get it resolved because I think it’s pointless to argue with people via email.

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Sony-Ericson T237

Sony-Ericson T237Update 02-20-05: I cancelled this order with Cingular. I’ll be staying with Alltel and my cell number will remain the same.

I just ordered (yet another) new cell phone and I haven’t even told my wife yet. The good thing is that it was only $29.95 and no shipping or sales tax. It’s not the worlds greatest phone but it should work for my purposes and I’ve heard that Cingular has decent coverage in North Raleigh. We’ll see. It has an optional camera phone that goes with it for $44.00 if I feel like I need it later.

Look for pics of my new truck tomorrow. It’s sad but I haven’t been feeling well enough lately to even go to the driveway to take the photos. I’m also going to hook up the Nikon Coolscan that finally arrived a few days ago so I can start scanning slides. I know stomach flu wreaks havoc on most people but try it with Crohn’s. It will probably take until this time next month before I completely recover. I feel pretty slack about my entries. Obviously I’ve had a lot to blog about lately, I just haven’t made the time to do it.

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What a #*@%!! week.

Two new employees started in the IT Dept. at Dillon Supply – 1 permanent, 1 contractor. That was enough to keep me slammed at work with everything else going on: Telecommunications carrier meetings (MPLS or Frame?), server builds, incompatible KVM switches, what else?…too much to mention.

imageAmy didn’t get her car back until Friday. Good news: it looks and drives better than before she crashed it. Bad news: Last Monday she got rear-ended in my Mustang by a Ford F-250. No competition, the Mustang’s totaled. I got enough in the insurance settlement to take care of the loan. Now I’ve got to find something to drive. Probably a truck.image

For now I’m driving a 2005 F-150 until Wednesday courtesy of Travelers Insurance and Enterprise. It’s a beast on the road but surprisingly it’s grown on me and the Santa Fe feels really small now. I may have to stick with a full size pickup. I just don’t know what flavor: F-150, Silverado, Dodge RAM?

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Tax Time. e-file!

Our Federal returns have been accepted and are being processed, the State takes 5-7 days to “accept” the electronic return. State an Fed combined we’ll get just enough back to cover Amy’s fall tuition and books. I used Turbo Tax for the web. I highly recommend it. It was easy and fast.

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Nikon Coolscan III LS-30

Now I’m ready. I just won a 35mm Nikon transparency scanner on ebay. This Coolscan LS-30 originally sold for $750 to $900 from 1999-2002. I paid a whopping $57.96 plus shipping. I may even dedicate an old PC to it. I happen to have a 19″ Viewsonic monitor that’s not being used. I could build a retro, late 90’s digital image processing station.

imageThis unit’s got modern power though. It scans at up to 2700 dpi (25MB file) from a 35mm negative and uses Nikon Coolscan software – the best in the business. It doesn’t have high end things like multi-sample averaging and can’t output files with more than 8 bits per channel. To get features like those you’ve gotta spend some bucks. This is an old-school pro-tool that has fallen into my price range by technological attrition.

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what…WEATHERBUG!?

imageI apologize for my lack of updates lately. I’ve been slammed at work and at home. More work, more birthdays (my dads this time) and then more work again. Today Amy loaded AOL Instant Messenger on my primary PC at home so that she could chat with Katie. Innocent enough. But then to my shock, horror and embarrassment I found Weatherbug on my Start Menu tonight. I’m not sure what saved me from the stroke. Devinne intervention?

Ad-Aware to the rescue – save me now. Sure ‘nuf, 13 data miners were found, quarantined and deleted. Whoa. I still feel violated. The machine seems healthy. Amy didn’t know any better. And like most people she doesn’t understand my concern. So for those who can’t see the “big deal” – Weatherbug is spyware. It loads cookies (files) on your PC to track where you go o the Internet. And AOL is happy to load it for you with Instant Messenger unless you specifically say no. To explain how robust and efficient it is I’ll let the fact that it made 76 connections to 13 sites for traffic reporting in the 9 hours it was on my PC stand as testament. And now I’ve done my “end user support” duties for the evening.

In my world AOL stands for All Outta Luck. Stay away from it at all costs. If you must use IM software, please use Yahoo Messenger. Your PC will thank you. Just for the record, I let Amy keep AOL IM installed. I cleaned off the rest of the garbage it came with.

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How Dell made North Carolina beg for business | The Register

How Dell made North Carolina beg for business | The Register

Here’s an article showcasing our state representative’s fiscal discipline. I’m so proud to be from North Cakalacky, the only state where elected officials can’t pronounce the names of towns that end in “oro”. I guess Dell had to receive some incentive to build a plant in a place like “Greensbur”. It’s not exactly the technology center of the universe.

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VisionMan 10 “Servers”

imageYes, here come some cheapo, generic VisionMan 10 servers for Dillon Supply’s rack. $1600 for the pair with 1GB of RAM each and a Western Digital 250GB Hard Drive.

The BIOS could see the 250GB drive and it’s full capacity (of course Windoze 2K Server setup could not) but the RealTek PXE boot manager hated it. So I bypassed it and still kept getting the ‘ol “Hard Disk Fail: Drive Not Found” error when trying to boot straight to the drive.

In frustration I popped the 80GB drive in that came with the stupid thing back in. Formated it NTFS, loaded 2000 Server, SQL Server Enterprise, alot of of dependencies, hotfixes and anti-virus. Bang – server running. Now it’s time to add the 250GB drive which Windoze will see now that SP4 installed…. but noooooooo…

The freakin’ server’s only got enough power couplings coming off the 200W power supply for one hard drive! So why did they build the chasis for two??? And to make matters worse, the way the drives fit in the drive bay doesn’t allow for the IDE cable to reach both drives. I gotta find a cable with more distance between the female inputs. Splitting power and abnormal cable requirements – that’s what goin’ cheap gets you. Quite a pain for a couple of test servers.

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Rotary Cell Phone

Spark Fun Electronics – Rotary Cell Phone

imageFound on slashdot: This article explains how to turn an old rotary phone into a wireless cell if you are someone who knows all the acronyms. I’m building one of these for my desk at work as soon as I have time (which means maybe next year). How retro-cool is this? I can’t explain.

I haven’t had the chance to work on a PCB in a couple of years. Haven’t really had a reason to until now. And I’ve never touched a cell chip before… success is eminent.

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